THAT nature has her moments of sympathy with man has been noted
often enough,—and generally as a new discovery. To us, who had never
known any other condition of things, it seemed entirely right and
fitting that the wind sang and sobbed in the poplar tops, and, in
the lulls of it, sudden spirts of rain spattered the already dusty
roads, on that blusterous March day when Edward and I awaited, on the
station platform, the arrival of the new tutor. Needless to say, this
arrangement had been planned by an aunt, from some fond idea that our
shy, innocent young natures would unfold themselves during the walk
from the station, and that, on the revelation of each other’s more
solid qualities that must inevitably ensue, an enduring friendship,
springing from mutual respect, might be firmly based. A pretty
dream,—nothing more. For Edward, who foresaw that the brunt of tutorial
oppression would have to be borne by him, was sulky, monosyllabic,
and determined to be as negatively disagreeable as good manners would
permit. It was therefore evident that I would have to be spokesman
and purveyor of hollow civilities, and I was none the more amiable
on that account; all courtesies, welcomes, explanations, and other
court-chamberlain kind of business, being my special aversion. There
was much of the tempestuous March weather in the hearts of both of us,
as we sullenly glowered along the carriage-windows of the slackening
train.
One is apt, however, to misjudge the special difficulties of
a situation; and the reception proved, after all, an easy and
informal matter. In a trainful so uniformly bucolic, a tutor was
readily recognisable; and his portmanteau had been consigned to the
luggage-cart, and his person conveyed into the lane, before I had
discharged one of my carefully considered sentences. I breathed more
easily, and looking up at our new friend as we stepped out together,
remembered that we had been counting on something altogether more
arid, scholastic, and severe. A boyish eager face and a petulant
_pince-nez_—untidy hair—a head of constant quick turns like a robin’s,
and a voice that kept breaking into alto—these were all very strange
and new, but not in the least terrible.
He proceeded jerkily through the village, with glances on this side and
that; and ‘Charming,’ he broke out presently; ‘quite too charming and
delightful!’
I had not counted on this sort of thing, and glanced for help to
Edward, who, hands in pockets, looked grimly down his nose. He had
taken his line, and meant to stick to it.
Meantime our friend had made an imaginary spy-glass out of his fist,
and was squinting through it at something I could not perceive. ‘What
an exquisite bit!’ he burst out. ‘Fifteenth century—no—yes it is!’
I began to feel puzzled, not to say alarmed. It reminded me of the
butcher in the _Arabian Nights_, whose common joints, displayed on the
shop-front, took to a startled public the appearance of dismembered
humanity. This man seemed to see the strangest things in our dull,
familiar surroundings.
‘Ah!’ he broke out again, as we jogged on between hedgerows: ‘and
that field now—backed by the downs—with the rain-cloud brooding over
it,—that’s all David Cox—every bit of it!’
‘That field belongs to Farmer Larkin,’ I explained politely; for of
course he could not be expected to know. ‘I’ll take you over to Farmer
Cox’s to-morrow, if he’s a friend of yours; but there‘s nothing to see
there.’
Edward, who was hanging sullenly behind, made a face at me, as if to
say, ‘What sort of lunatic have we got here?’
‘It has the true pastoral character, this country of yours,’ went on
our enthusiast: ‘with just that added touch in cottage and farmstead,
relics of a bygone art, which makes our English landscape so divine, so
unique!’
Really this grasshopper was becoming a burden! These familiar fields
and farms, of which we knew every blade and stick, had done nothing
that I knew of to be bespattered with adjectives in this way. I had
never thought of them as divine, unique, or anything else. They
were—well, they were just themselves, and there was an end of it.
Despairingly I jogged Edward in the ribs, as a sign to start rational
conversation, but he only grinned and continued obdurate.
‘You can see the house now,’ I remarked presently; ‘and that’s Selina,
chasing the donkey in the paddock. Or is it the donkey chasing Selina?
I can’t quite make out; but it’s _them_, anyhow.’
Needless to say, he exploded with a full charge of adjectives.
‘Exquisite!’ he rapped out; ‘so mellow and harmonious! and so entirely
in keeping!’ (I could see from Edward’s face that he was thinking who
ought to be in keeping.) ‘Such possibilities of romance, now, in those
old gables!’
‘If you mean the garrets,’ I said, ‘there’s a lot of old furniture
in them; and one is generally full of apples; and the bats get in
sometimes, under the eaves, and flop about till we go up with
hair-brushes and things and drive ’em out; but there’s nothing else in
them that I know of.’
‘O, but there must be more than bats,’ he cried. ‘Don’t tell me there
are no ghosts. I shall be deeply disappointed if there aren’t any
ghosts.’
I did not think it worth while to reply, feeling really unequal to this
sort of conversation. Besides, we were nearing the house, when my task
would be ended. Aunt Eliza met us at the door, and in the cross-fire of
adjectives that ensued—both of them talking at once, as grown-up folk
have a habit of doing—we two slipped round to the back of the house,
and speedily put several broad acres between us and civilisation, for
fear of being ordered in to tea in the drawing-room. By the time we
returned, our new importation had gone up to dress for dinner, so till
the morrow at least we were free of him.
Meanwhile the March wind, after dropping a while at sundown, had been
steadily increasing in volume; and although I fell asleep at my
usual hour, about midnight I was wakened by the stress and the cry of
it. In the bright moonlight, wind-swung branches tossed and swayed
eerily across the blinds; there was rumbling in chimneys, whistling in
keyholes, and everywhere a clamour and a call. Sleep was out of the
question, and, sitting up in bed, I looked round. Edward sat up too.
‘I was wondering when you were going to wake,’ he said. ‘It’s no good
trying to sleep through this. I vote we get up and do something.’
‘I’m game,’ I replied. ‘Let’s play at being in a ship at sea’ (the
plaint of the old house under the buffeting wind suggested this,
naturally); ‘and we can be wrecked on an island, or left on a raft,
whichever you choose; but I like an island best myself, because there’s
more things on it.’
Edward on reflection negatived the idea. ‘It would make too much
noise,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s no fun playing at ships, unless you
can make a jolly good row.’
The door creaked, and a small figure in white slipped cautiously in.
‘Thought I heard you talking,’ said Charlotte. ‘We don’t like it;
we’re afraid—Selina too! She’ll be here in a minute. She’s putting on
her new dressing-gown she’s so proud of.’
His arms round his knees, Edward cogitated deeply until Selina
appeared, barefooted, and looking slim and tall in the new
dressing-gown. Then, ‘Look here,’ he exclaimed; ‘now we’re all
together, I vote we go and explore!’
‘You’re always wanting to explore,’ I said. ‘What on earth is there to
explore for in this house?’
‘Biscuits!’ said the inspired Edward.
‘Hooray! Come on!’ chimed in Harold, sitting up suddenly. He had been
awake all the time, but had been shamming asleep, lest he should be
fagged to do anything.
It was indeed a fact, as Edward had remembered, that our thoughtless
elders occasionally left the biscuits out, a prize for the
night-walking adventurer with nerves of steel.
Edward tumbled out of bed, and pulled a baggy old pair of
knickerbockers over his bare shanks. Then he girt himself with a
belt, into which he thrust, on the one side a large wooden pistol,
on the other an old single-stick; and finally he donned a big
slouch-hat—once an uncle’s—that we used for playing Guy Fawkes and
Charles-the-Second-up-a-tree in. Whatever the audience, Edward, if
possible, always dressed for his parts with care and conscientiousness;
while Harold and I, true Elizabethans, cared little about the mounting
of the piece, so long as the real dramatic heart of it beat sound.
Our commander now enjoined on us a silence deep as the grave, reminding
us that Aunt Eliza usually slept with an open door, past which we had
to file.
‘But we’ll take the short cut through the Blue Room,’ said the wary
Selina.
‘Of course,’ said Edward approvingly. ‘I forgot about that. Now then!
You lead the way!’
The Blue Room had in prehistoric times been added to by taking in a
superfluous passage, and so not only had the advantage of two doors,
but also enabled us to get to the head of the stairs without passing
the chamber wherein our dragon-aunt lay couched. It was rarely
occupied, except when a casual uncle came down for the night. We
entered in noiseless file, the room being plunged in darkness, except
for a bright strip of moonlight on the floor, across which we must
pass for our exit. On this our leading lady chose to pause, seizing
the opportunity to study the hang of her new dressing-gown. Greatly
satisfied thereat, she proceeded, after the feminine fashion, to
peacock and to pose, pacing a minuet down the moonlit patch with an
imaginary partner. This was too much for Edward’s histrionic instincts,
and after a moment’s pause he drew his single-stick, and, with
flourishes meet for the occasion, strode on to the stage. A struggle
ensued on approved lines, at the end of which Selina was stabbed slowly
and with unction, and her corpse borne from the chamber by the ruthless
cavalier. The rest of us rushed after in a clump, with capers and
gesticulations of delight; the special charm of the performance lying
in the necessity for its being carried out with the dumbest of dumb
shows.
[Illustration: “WE ENTERED IN NOISELESS FILE, THE ROOM BEING PLUNGED IN
DARKNESS, EXCEPT FOR A BRIGHT STRIP OF MOONLIGHT ON THE FLOOR”]
Once out on the dark landing, the noise of the storm without told
us that we had exaggerated the necessity for silence; so, grasping
the tails of each other’s nightgowns, even as Alpine climbers rope
themselves together in perilous places, we fared stoutly down the
staircase-moraine, and across the grim glacier of the hall, to where a
faint glimmer from the half-open door of the drawing-room beckoned to
us like friendly hostel-lights. Entering, we found that our thriftless
seniors had left the sound red heart of a fire, easily coaxed into a
cheerful blaze; and biscuits—a plateful—smiled at us in an encouraging
sort of way, together with the halves of a lemon, already squeezed,
but still suckable. The biscuits were righteously shared, the lemon
segments passed from mouth to mouth; and as we squatted round the fire,
its genial warmth consoling our unclad limbs, we realised that so many
nocturnal perils had not been braved in vain.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Edward, as we chatted, ‘how I hate this room
in the daytime. It always means having your face washed, and your hair
brushed, and talking silly company talk. But to-night it’s really quite
jolly. Looks different, somehow.’
‘I never can make out,’ I said, ‘what people come here to tea for.
They can have their own tea at home if they like—they’re not poor
people—with jam and things, and drink out of their saucer, and suck
their fingers and enjoy themselves; but they come here from a long way
off, and sit up straight with their feet off the bars of their chairs,
and have one cup, and talk the same sort of stuff every time.’
Selina sniffed disdainfully. ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ she
said. ‘In society you have to call on each other. It’s the proper thing
to do.’
‘Pooh! _you’re_ not in society,’ said Edward politely; ‘and, what’s
more, you never will be.’
‘Yes, I shall, some day,’ retorted Selina; ‘but I shan’t ask you to
come and see me, so there!’
‘Wouldn’t come if you did,’ growled Edward.
‘Well you won’t get the chance,’ rejoined our sister, claiming
her right of the last word. There was no heat about these little
amenities, which made up—as understood by us—the art of polite
conversation.
‘I don’t like society people,’ put in Harold from the sofa, where he
was sprawling at full length—a sight the daylight hours would have
blushed to witness. ‘There were some of ’em here this afternoon, when
you two had gone off to the station. O, and I found a dead mouse on
the lawn, and I wanted to skin it, but I wasn’t sure I knew how, by
myself; and they came out into the garden, and patted my head—I wish
people wouldn’t do that—and one of ’em asked me to pick her a flower.
Don’t know why she couldn’t pick it herself; but I said, “All right,
I will if you’ll hold my mouse.” But she screamed, and threw it away;
and Augustus (the cat) got it, and ran away with it. I believe it was
really his mouse all the time, ’cos he’d been looking about as if he
had lost something, so I wasn’t angry with _him_. But what did _she_
want to throw away my mouse for?’
‘You have to be careful with mice,’ reflected Edward; ‘they’re such
slippery things. Do you remember we were playing with a dead mouse once
on the piano, and the mouse was Robinson Crusoe, and the piano was the
island, and somehow Crusoe slipped down inside the island, into its
works, and we couldn’t get him out, though we tried rakes and all sorts
of things, till the tuner came. And that wasn’t till a week after, and
then——’
Here Charlotte, who had been nodding solemnly, fell over into the
fender; and we realised that the wind had dropped at last, and the
house was lapped in a great stillness. Our vacant beds seemed to be
calling to us imperiously; and we were all glad when Edward gave the
signal for retreat. At the top of the staircase Harold unexpectedly
turned mutinous, insisting on his right to slide down the banisters in
a free country. Circumstances did not allow of argument; I suggested
frog’s-marching instead, and accordingly frog’s-marched he was, the
procession passing solemnly across the moon-lit Blue Room, with Harold
horizontal and limply submissive. Snug in bed at last, I was just
slipping off into slumber when I heard Edward explode, with chuckle
and snort.
‘By Jove!’ he said; ‘I forgot all about it. The new tutor’s sleeping in
the Blue Room!’
‘Lucky he didn’t wake up and catch us,’ I grunted drowsily; and,
without another thought on the matter, we both sank into well-earned
repose.
Next morning, coming down to breakfast braced to grapple with fresh
adversity, we were surprised to find our garrulous friend of the
previous day—he was late in making his appearance—strangely silent and
(apparently) pre-occupied. Having polished off our porridge, we ran out
to feed the rabbits, explaining to them that a beast of a tutor would
prevent their enjoying so much of our society as formerly.
On returning to the house at the fated hour appointed for study, we
were thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the
drive, freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally
uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she
thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too
ready to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from our minds.
Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a
flying visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly,
_Psyche: a Journal of the Unseen_; and proceeded laboriously to rid
himself of much incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We
bore it patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious
to get at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay
in a paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum
habitation. ‘Case III.,’ it began. ‘The following particulars were
communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and
earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience.’ A
fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that
were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless
drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a
manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination.
The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there—the
storm at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder
re-enacted, and so on—already worn threadbare in many a Christmas
Number. No one was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its
connexion with our quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always
suspected the fellow, persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a
brief span was, somehow or other, at the bottom of it.
[Illustration]